But indeed. The following nifty jeremiad is from Nicholas Von Hoffman's column in the current NY Observer (full text is at http://www.observer.com/pages/observer.htm):
"... without resorting to the language of the 1960’s and the War on Poverty, or stirring up class warfare, as Republicans say when bloodying the heads of old-time bleeding hearts, there is yet reason to nurse forebodings when thinking of a John T. Chambers, the top whip-cracker at Cisco Systems Inc. who pulls in nearly $122 million for a year’s work though we are positive that the dear soul is worth every penny of it and more. Even so, if you step back and think in terms of the commonweal, chaps like Mr. Chambers may pose a problem, and I’m not referring to recent accusations in Barron’s that the company has misstated its profitability. Whether or not there is a shady side to the entirely laudable Mr. Chambers we’ll leave to the day traders, market touts and stock plungers to sort out.
"The problem with Mr. Chambers is that he and those like him have become too numerous, too too rich and too too too conspicuous. Our political system was built on the assumption that the United States, being a rural society of smallish farmers, would have an electorate with more or less the same material stake in the nation’s well-being. Now we’re trying a new experiment. Now we’re trying to run a democracy in which a tiny percentage of the population owns most of the wealth and has a chattel mortgage on most of the population. Can a democracy, owned and operated by C.E.O.’s and the inherited rich, who have little materially in common with the great majority, happily reflect the people’s will over an extended period of time? Or is this the dry underbrush of an uncontrollable class warfare wildfire somewhere down the road?
"Beside the political considerations in the transformation of the American system into the rule of the rich, there are cultural and moral factors. When the rich stay in the background and flaunt it so the rest of us don’t see it, they have their place and their uses, but now, like a vermicular insect that lives in the ground and corkscrews up into light and air in 100-year cycles, the rich have emerged again and are swarming over the trees and the rooftops of automobiles, covering every surface, crawling over each other, entwining, sliding, an aureate mass heaving, swaying, climbing and sliming. It’s been a full century since the golden calf crowd has so dominated daily life in America. Again Dives is courted, made way for, deferred to and fussed over and glorified to the exclusion of all but movie stars and athletes who are, of course, as rich as the ordinary, run-of-the mill business richie. And in Manhattan! It has become an island of modern maharajahs trailed by their processions of body servants, couturiers, accountants, drug pushers, personal trainers, closet arrangers, chefs, plastic surgeons, architects, lawyers, interior designers, head waiters, pimps, estate planners, therapists, jewelers, flatterers and flunkies. We may not be saddled with a class system like the one the Brits have, but the behavior of Manhattanites in a society in which money orders status, opinion and rank of every kind leaves not much to choose from between the two places. Money corrupts and lots of money corrupts lots as the bowers compete with the scrapers for stock tips and other gratuities in a city now divided between the purse-proud and the slobbering, envious masses who, in the midst of such show and wealth, have lost their way, their values and their dignity.
"New York has mutated from mere money mania to money idolatry. Money is the extra molecule in the air New Yorkers breathe, the ugly free radical for which there is no antioxidant, the subject of every conversation, the standard of every judgment. If you don’t have 5 million bucks to your name in New York you are dog shit on the sidewalks, ripe for the pooper scooper, for the reign of the rich and the rule of the wealthy is here."
Carl
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